The Ottoman domination ...

THE OTTOMAN
DOMINATION

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1917

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THE OTTOMAN
DOMINATION

(Reprinted from The Round Talk

T. FISHER UNWIN, Ltd.

i, ADELPH1 TERRACE, LONDON

1917

e

Digitized by the Internet Archive

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THE OTTOMAN DOMINATION.

(Reprinted from 'Che Round 'Cable.)

When President Wilson asked the belligerents
for a statement of their aims, the Allies gave, among
their conditions, the expulsion of the Ottoman
Empire from Europe and the liberation of the
peoples subject to its rule. They described the
Ottoman State as "radically alien to Western
Civilisation," and its methods of government as a
"murderous tyranny." These charges will be
found, on examination, to be entirely true, and the
remedies to be the least that will cure the evil. But
they also imply that the just and enduring settle-
ment which the Allies desire is quite incompatible
with the status quo in Turkey, and it is therefore
important to realise what the Ottoman Empire was
before the War, and what it has become since enter-
ing into it.

The political map is deceptive. On the map
the area marked "Turkey" is rounded off and
coloured in like the areas marked "Italy" or
" France" or " Great Britain"; and as a proposal to
partition these would be regarded on all hands as
a political crime, so the like proposal in regard to
Turkey might seem, to anyone judging merely by
the map, to be at any rate an aggression. The dif-
ference between the two cases is not apparent on
the face of them, and calls for explanation.

How did these different areas take their colour?
In other words, what has been the history of the
States that have made these territories their own?

4 THE OTTOMAN DOMINATION

Their differences appear in their origin. Those
States which on the map are indistinguishable from
Turkey are national States. Their claim to in-
tegrity rests on the common desire of the inhabi-
tants of their territory, and the inhabitants feel this
desire either because they originally found the
land empty and spread over it from a single stock,
like the American nation; or because they lived in
the land politically disunited, and then united the
land and themselves by a common act of will, like the
Italian nation in the Risorgimento ; or because the
territory grew gradually by conquest or inheritance,
and democracy kept pace with expansion, so that
old and new citizens combined into a single free
community — the history of England and France.
The Ottoman Empire, on the other hand, is not a
national State. It has not grown by willing co-
operation between neighbours, but by the domina-
tion of a military power over what might have been
nations, or parts of nations, if Ottoman militarism
had not cut them short. And this military domina-
tion has never improved its original character. Of
the peoples conquered by it, some have shaken off
its yoke again and some remain under it still. But
none have been assimilated by it, none have become
willing members of its body politic.

The breaking up of Turkey is not the destruc-
tion of a living commonwealth, but a liberation of
enslaved peoples from prison, a clearing of the
ground for the commonwealths which these peoples
are at last to build. This is not a theoretical argu-
ment, but a fact of history, for the break-up of
Turkey is not a new thing. It has been happening

THE OTTOMAN DOMINATION 5

for two centuries. The Balkan War of 19 12- 13
was its penultimate stage, and it has already added
six nations to the independent States of Europe.

This Ottoman Power, which has overshadowed
so many lands and peoples in Asia and Europe,
sprang from small beginnings. Its founder was
chief of a little troop of Turkish nomads, who in
the 13th century wandered into Asia Minor from
Central Asia. The Turkish Sultans already estab-
lished in the country let the wanderer carve himself
out a camping-place on their north-western marches
— the hill country behind the Asiatic shores of the
Sea of Marmora, looking down upon what was then
a Greek coast belonging to the Byzantine Empire.
The founder's son turned the camping-ground into
a State, and, taking the name of Osman on his con-
version from paganism to Islam, bequeathed it to
his successors. The Osmanlis are those who have
carried on what Osman began — and they have been
faithful to his ideas. In less than three centuries
they added to Osman's few square miles of hill
country, till their territory stretched from Hungary
and Algiers and the Crimea to the Red Sea and
the Persian Gulf, and they won the whole of it by
military technique. The Osmanlis expanded be-
cause they had better drill, better artillery, better
military roads than the peoples they overthrew ; and
they have staved off their extinction by becoming
ready pupils of those who have surpassed them in
the military art. They have borrowed from Prussia
their ability to fight in the present War ; the instinct
for soldiering is the Osmanli's one and inalienable
characteristic.

6 THE OTTOMAN DOMINATION

No other military State has ever so remorse-
lessly exploited its human material. Prussia grew
by the conscription of the conquered. The
Silesians conquered from Austria in 1740 were
drilled to fight against her in 1866; the Hano-
verians conquered in 1866 were sent as canonen-
f utter against France in 1870; the Alsatians con-
quered in 1870 are manning the German trenches
at Monastir and Pinsk. But the Osmanlis' system
was Spartan. They did not take a mere toll of
years from grown men's lives, but men's whole lives
from infancy — a tribute of so many children from
each subject Christian family, every so many years.
These children were separated for ever from their
families at the earliest possible age, educated in a
military school as Moslems, and drafted into a
standing army, fanatically devoted to their corps,
the Osmanli Sultan and Islam, and with no other
ties in the world. The Janissaries (or " New Model
Army" — as, indeed, they were) made the Ottoman
conquests, and each fresh people they brought
under the Ottoman domination became a fresh re-
cruiting-ground. The Ottoman Empire spread
with a disastrous momentum, engulfing free peoples
and destroying well-grown States — the Byzantine
Empire, which had preserved at Constantinople the
heritage of Ancient Greek Civilisation ; the young,
vigorous kingdoms of Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia,
Hungary; the Roumanian principalities of Wal-
lachia and Moldavia; the Albanian tribesmen; the
Greek and French and Italian lordships in the
^Egean Islands and Peloponnesus.. All these were
overthrown by the Osmanlis in Europe, and in

THE OTTOMAN DOMINATION 7

Asia their conquests were as thorough and as wide.
They conquered impartially, not only Christians
but Moslems, not only Moslems but Turks.
Their bitterest enemies were the kindred Turkish
States of Asia Minor, especially the Sultanate of
Karaman, in the .heart of the peninsula. When
they had overthrown Karaman, they conquered
southward and eastward — Armenia and Mesopo-
tamia from the Shahs of Persia, Syria and Egypt
and the Holy Cities from the Mamelukes, lesser
Armenia and Trebizond from their national
Christian princes. Their hand was against every
man's, and none whom they conquered became
reconciled to their rule.

Ottoman policy towards conquered peoples has
passed through three phases — all bad, but each
worse than the last. The first phase may be called
the policy of neglect, and Sultan Mohammed II.,
who conquered Constantinople in 1453 and organ-
ised what he and his predecessors since Osman had
acquired, may stand as its author. This policy re-
garded the subject peoples simply as raw material
for the production of Ottoman requirements — tri-
bute in children and tribute in kind for the Osmanli
Sultan's army, and peasant labour for the estates
of the "beys" or feudal retainers whom the Sultans
planted on the richest part of the conquered
soil. Beyond these servitudes — which were as
barbarically simple as Ottoman militarism itself —
the Ottoman Empire had no use for its subject
peoples. They were beyond the Osmanli's social
pale; or, rather, they were not, in his eyes, even
human, but "Rayah" — cattle — who might fore-

8 THE OTTOMAN DOMINATION

gather in any kind of herd they liked so long as
they submitted to be milked and slaughtered. Pro-
vided they remained docile, it was to the Osmanlis'
interest that they should shepherd themselves,
and Mohammed II. encouraged the formation of
"millets," or subject national communities, within
the Ottoman State. The "millets" (the most im-
portant of which were the Armenian and the Greek)
were ostensibly ecclesiastical corporations. At the
head of each there was a Patriarch and Council
resident in Constantinople, who exercised authority
over their nationality through a hierarchy of metro-
politans, bishops and village priests. But there
was little trace of religion in the institution. The
clergy were raised to power by the Osmanlis be-
cause they were the only corporate organisation in
the subject peoples which Ottoman conquest had
not destroyed. As the last national rallying point,
they retained an influence over their countrymen
which the Ottoman Government could not override,
and, in return for the recognition of it, they under-
took to wield it as Ottoman officials. The Patri-
archs of the "millets" were more than religious
primates. The administration of civil law among
their nationals was largely left in their hands, and
their jurisdiction was supported by the force of the
Ottoman State. In addition to this licensed mea-
sure of self-government, there was much actual
liberty among the Sultan's less accessible subjects
— islanders and bedouin and mountaineers. It has
been said of this phase of Ottoman domination that
countries and peoples prospered under it in propor-
tion to their neglect by the Ottoman Government,

THE OTTOMAN DOMINATION 9

and it is certainly true that all the good that has
come out of the territory painted Ottoman on the
map, since and so long as this territory has been in
Ottoman power, has come in spite of, and never
through the agency of, the Ottoman Government,
and would have been infinitely greater if that
Government had never expanded from its original
restricted seat.

The only merits, then, of Ottoman policy in this
first phase were its indifference and neglect, which
gave its subjects liberty to prosper if they could.
But this phase only lasted while the Osmanlis were
a conquering power, and their military machine, like
every other that has ever been made, had a limited
span of vitality. The invincible Janissaries sank
first into a hereditary militia, then into a privileged
shopkeeping class. Their privileges were for their
sons, and new Christian recruits became unwelcome
interlopers. In the 17th century the tribute of
children was abandoned, through the jealousy of
the Janissaries themselves, not through the humani-
tarianism of the Ottoman Government. The mili-
tary basis of Ottoman domination was sapped, and
during the next two centuries the Ottoman terri-
tory shrank almost as rapidly as it had expanded
before. A good Government would have arrested
dissolution by making life worth living for the sub-
ject peoples within the Ottoman frontiers, and so
giving them a positive interest in the preservation
of the Ottoman State. It would have granted fuller
self-government to the "millets," more unrestricted
freedom to the islanders and bedouin and moun-
taineers. It would have enlisted the warlike quali-

io THE OTTOMAN DOMINATION

ties of the Albanians, the seamanship of the Greeks,
the horsemanship of the Arabs, the business ability
of the Syrians, Armenians and Jews, the industry
ot the Bulgarian and Anatolian peasantry, and
would have drawn, all these elements together into
a national State. Such things were done by the
Governments — military, too, in their origin — which
created England and France. But between the
Osmanlis and those they had conquered a great gulf
remained, which the Osmanlis never attempted to
bridge. As the Osmanlis were beaten in war, their
subject peoples broke away — some to find a better
life under other States, some to found new national
States of their own, but all outside the Ottoman
dominion and only at the expense of its territorial
integrity.

Instead of conciliating their subjects, the
Osmanlis began to feel that they could no longer
afford to leave them the liberty they had allowed
them in the past. The subject peoples must no
longer be permitted to make the best of themselves ;
on the contrary, they must be made weaker and more
wretched than they were. Towards the end of the
19th century, when the complete extinction of
the Ottoman Empire was in sight, this feeling
was framed into a new policy by Sultan Abd-ul-
Hamid.

Hamidianism was the second phase of Ottoman
domination. Starting with the absence of any im-
pulse to build an Ottoman nationality, but facing
the fact that, as Osmanli rule grew weaker, one
subject people after another was awaking to a
national life of its own. Abd-ul-Hamid decided to

THE OTTOMAN DOMINATION n

exploit these national movements within his Empire
by turning them against one another. Instead of
developing what was good in themselves, they
should be egged on to maim and warp the develop-
ment of their neighbours. All would thus be
weakened more rapidly even than the Sultan's own
Government, and he would be making the integrity
of his territory secure as he made the inhabitants
of it disillusioned and miserable.

Abd-ul-Hamid reigned from 1876 to 1908, and
carried his policy out. He ruined the "millets" —
not by erecting a Bulgarian Exarchate, which was
a just and beneficial act in itself, but by granting
this Exarchate jurisdiction over populations which
the Greek Patriarchate had a right to consider its
own. Bulgarian ambition was stimulated, Greek
jealousy was aroused, and the two chief national
bodies in the Osmanlis' remaining Balkan territory
were drawn into a fratricidal conflict, which ab-
sorbed their energies for evil instead of good. By
about 1890 Greek and Bulgarian "bands" had been
formed in Macedonia, which " converted" the Mace-
donian villagers from the Patriarchate to the Ex-
archate, or vice versa, and back again, by descend-
ing upon them alternately and terrorising or mas-
sacring all villagers who held to the opposite
allegiance. The Osmanli gendarmerie did not
suppress these bands. They contented themselves
with burning a village now and then — " for harbour-
ine them," though the bandsmen were the least
welcome euests the villagers had ever received. As
the anarchy and bloodshed in Macedonia grew
worse, the free Balkan States were brought to the

i2 THE OTTOMAN DOMINATION

verge of war on behalf of their suffering fellow-
countrymen, and the relations of the Great Powers
were strained by the fear that a Balkan outbreak
might upset the balance between them. And both
these catastrophes occurred within a few years of
Abd-ul-Hamid's deposition. The Balkan Wars of
19 1 2- 1 3 — first of the Balkan League against the
Ottoman Empire, and then of the confederates
against each other — were the direct fruit of Abd-ul-
Hamid's policy; and the European War, so far as
it was produced by Balkan causes, lies also at his
door. This was the Macedonian policy of Abd-ul-
Hamid, and it was perpetrated simply in order that
certain territories in Europe, which the Osmanlis
had no more right to govern f than those from which
they had been ejected already, should remain Otto-
man on the political map.

The same bloodshed and anarchy, with the same
purpose, were fomented by Abd-ul-Hamid wherever
he ruled. Having set the Bulgars against the
Greeks, he encouraged the Albanians to harry the
Serbs. The Albanian tribesmen came down from
their mountains and evicted the Serbian peasantry
from their ancestral villages in the plains of Kos-
sovo, while the Ottoman Government looked on
and the free Serbs beyond the frontier were unable
to interfere. But the Sultan's chosen instruments
were the Kurds — a race of mountain shepherds in
the eastern Asiatic provinces, whom previous Sul-
tans had tried to reduce to order, but whom Abd-ul-
Hamid armed with modern rifles and organised into
" Hamidian Gendarmerie" for use against the
Armenians.

THE OTTOMAN DOMINATION 13

To rob and murder the Armenians was the ser-
vice asked of the Kurds and the reward given them
for it; and here, as in Macedonia, the policy pro-
duced bloodshed and anarchy after Abd-ul-Hamid's
heart. The Armenians formed counter-organisa-
tions; some mountain communities broke into re-
volt. The Kurds were at once reinforced by
Osmanli regulars, the fanaticism of the Turkish
Mohammedans 111 Asia Minor was stirred up, and
during the years 1896-7 there were massacres of
Armenians from one end of the Empire to the other,
culminating in a butchery in the streets of Con-
stantinople. Before the Sultan had to yield to
foreign indignation, he had killed enough Armenian
men, women and children to weaken the Armenian
nation for .a generation ahead.

Abd-ul-Hamid was overthrown by a coalition of
revolutionaries from two of the nations he mis-
governed, the Anatolian Turks and the Salonica
Jews, who controlled, between them, the army and
finance. Under the name of the "Young Turkish
Party," this cabal has ruled the Ottoman Empire
since then. It is a secret committee, with branch
committees affiliated to it in the chief towns of the
Empire, and the Sultan, Ministry, Parliament and
Bureaucracy which it has set up are all puppets in
its hands. This secret committee — of " Union and
Progress," as it styles itself — brought the Ottoman
Empire into the European War, in order to obtain
a free hand for a new policy of domination, which
is the worst of all.

The first phase of Ottoman policy towards sub-
ject peoples was neglect, the Hamidian was attri-

14 THE OTTOMAN DOMINATION

tion ; but the Young Turkish phase is extermination,
and the Young Turks are carrying it out at this
moment by every means in their power.

They are " Nationalists," but they do not aim
at turning the territory still marked Ottoman on
the map into a national State, like Italy or France
or Great Britain or the American Union — States in
which all the inhabitants of the country are willing
citizens with equal rights. That, may figure in the
Young Turkish programme, but it is too alien to the
Osmanli tradition for any Ottoman Government to
undertake it, even if the Hamidian phase had not
gone before to make it impossible. The Young
Turks know that no subject people will now remain
under Ottoman dominion by choice; the problem is
to fetter them under it by force. The Young
Turkish motto is " Ottomanisation," which means
that Turkish habits, education, religion, but above
all language, are to be imposed upon every people
within the Ottoman frontiers, and that those who
cannot be coerced are to be eliminated.

This policy is borrowed from Central Europe,
where for the last fifty years 60,000,000 Germans
have been engaged in "Prussianising" about
6,000,000 Alsatians, Danes and • Poles, and
10,000,000 Magyars more than their own number
of Slovaks, Ruthenes, Roumanians and Southern
Slavs. The Young Turks have'set themselves to
impose the nationality of 8,000(000 Turkish-speak-
ing peasants in Anatolia upon almost twice as many
people of other races, the majority of whom are
their superiors : n civilisation. In the " Report of
Progress" submitted to the Young Turkish party

THE OTTOMAN DOMINATION 15

congress in October, 191 1, it was laid down that
" sooner or later the complete Ottomanisation of all
Turkish subjects must be carried out. It is clear,
however," the report continued, " that this result can
never be reached by persuasion, but that armed
force will have to be resorted to. . . . The other
nationalities must be denied the right of organisa-
tion, for decentralisation and autonomy are treason
to the Turkish Empire. The nationalities are a
quantite negligeable. They may keep their reli-
gion but not their language."

The Ottoman Government emerged from the
Balkan War of 191 2-13 with a territory reduced
to Thrace, Constantinople, the Straits and the
Provinces in Asia, and a population of between
20 and 25 millions (statistics are inexact). In this
population there were about 8,000,000 Turks,
nearly all living north of a line drawn from i\lex-
andretta to Van; 7,000,000 Arabs (Moslem or
Christian) to the south of that line; 2,000,000
Armenians and 2,000,000 Greeks, scattered over
the northern half of the Empire, the Greeks mostly
to the west and the Armenians to the east; and from
two to three million semi-independent hillmen —
Kurds, Kizil-Bashis, Yezidis, Maronites, Druses,
Nestorians and others. Many of these races of the
Empire were represented among the million or so
inhabitants of Constantinople. About half of
these inhabitants were Turks; there were 150,000
Armenians and 150,000 Greeks ; a handful of Kurds
and Arabs; a stiong colony of Jews, and an im-
portant foreign commercial population: Constanti-
nople was, and remains, a cosmopolitan city.

1 6 THE OTTOMAN DOMINATION

This was the Young Turks' field for Ottomani-
sation. They have been dealing with it piece by
piece. Between the end of the Balkan War and
their intervention in the European War they dealt
with Thrace, the only province left to them in
Europe. In 19 13 the population of Thrace was
predominantly Greek, with a Turkish element round
Adrianople and some Bulgarians in the mountains
towards the north-east. A year later only Turks
were left; Greeks and Bulgarians had been driven
out across the frontier, stripped of their property
and their lands. If the Young Turks now claim
Thrace as a purely Turkish country, it is well to
know how and when it became so. The " Ottomani-
sation" of Thrace is the most conclusive argument
for expelling the Ottoman Empire from Europe as
"radically alien to Western Civilisation."

At the same time the Young Turks began driv-
ing out the Greeks from the western coastlands of
Asia Minor. They meant to "solve" their Greek
problem altogether, and the kingdom of Greece
was on the verge of a second war with the Ottoman
Empire on this account, when the European War
supervened. As Allies of Germany, the Young
Turks, for reasons of common policy, had to give
their Greek subjects a respite; but, in compensa-
tion, they had a freer hand to settle with the other
races than they had ever had before. They need
no longer stop at eviction and attrition; they could
massacre on an infinitely greater scale than Abd-ul-
Hamid ever dared to do, and no foreign power
could restrain them so long as they had Germany's
countenance and military support.

THE OTTOMAN DOMINATION 17

The Young Turks are using their opportunity.
The extermination of the 2,000,000 Armenians is
already an accomplished fact. About two-thirds
of them were "deported" — men, women and
children- — hundreds of miles, for weeks on end,
over roadless mountains, to the semi-tropical
swamps and deserts on the Empire's southern
fringes. About half the exiles reached their
destinations, and have been dying there since of
starvation, exposure and disease. The other half
died of exhaustion on the way, or were murdered
by the gendarmes who escorted them and by
organised bands of brigands and Kurds. A third
of the nation may still be alive — the Armenians in
Constantinople and Smyrna were mostly spared;
a certain number escaped by conversion to Islam
(though this, for women and girls, involved entrance
into a Moslem's harem) ; about 200,000 escaped to
Russia and Egypt. These 200,000 refugees —
10 per cent, of the Armenians living under Otto-
man domination in 19 14 — are the only Ottoman
Armenians whose preservation is assured.

After eliminating the Armenians, the Young
Turks prepared the same fate for the Arabs, and
they have been engaged on this since 19 16. The
Arabs in the southern provinces have been able to
defend themselves. The province of Yemen, in
the hinterland of Aden, has been in chronic revolt
for years, and the Young Turks have abandoned
the attempt to subdue it's national rulers. The
province of Hedjaz, which contains the holy cities
of Mecca and Medina, reasserted its independence a
few months ago under the leadership of the Sherif

18 THE OTTOMAN DOMINATION

of Mecca, who is the hereditary custodian of the
holy cities. But Syria, still held down by Otto-
man armies, is being Ottomanised with might and
main. The Syrian leaders (Moslem or Christian
without distinction, for their common crime is that
they are Arabs and not Turks) are either dead or
in prison; the next blow will fall on the helpless
masses. It is the same method as with the
Armenians — the same organised direction from the
"Union and Progress" Committee at Constanti-
nople — and it will have the same end unless changes
in the military situation intervene.

The whole Young Turkish policy was summed
up in a sentence by an Osmanli gendarme to a
Danish Red Cross Sister : " First we kill the
Armenians, then the Greeks, then the Kurds." The
issue resolves itself into a question of time. Which
will be destroyed first? The subject peoples or
the Ottoman domination?

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